Alex has a great post today on his Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work. I’ve been hearing lately from many clients about the need for us to loosen up and accept more failure in our work. The pressure that comes from perfection and maintaining a failsafe environment is a killer, and while we all demand high levels of accountability and performance, working in a climate where we can fail-safe provides more opportunity to find creative ways forward that are hitherto unknown. So to compliment Alex’s post, here are a few ways to create a safe-fail environment: 1. Be …
Thanks to Benjamin Aaron Degenhart for pointing this out.
Geoff Brown put up a formidable blog post capturing the whole process of our recent designing, planning and facilitating a conference in Melbourne. If you are interested in multiple ways of learning and understanding process as well as ways of telling a story, set aside some time and go dive into what he has written. As one who was there, all I can say is, bang on, mate! PS there should be some sort of blog award for “most formidable blog post.” This one would win it.
I think it’s important to note that there is no research on “the art of hosting” that we know of but that there is much research out there in the world on what it is that we are working with and trying to evoke. One of the problems, as we are seeing in this thread, is that we don’t have the language or the conceptual frameworks to handle the extreme interiorty of this inquiry. In general, people looking for “research” on collective intelligence, emergence and social fields are looking for objective evidence that if we use participatory methods, things will …
I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what …